Pain's World

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It's a little past 5 p.m. on an August Thursday, rush hour is tightening its throttlehold on Manhattan, and T-Pain, crossing Midtown in a black Escalade, is just starting his workday. But after about 16 minutes, he slumps down into his bucket seat, splays his powder blue New Balances and decides he’s had enough.

“Fuuuuck this.”

This morning, he flew in from Atlanta, where he partied late the night before, and conked out. In the afternoon, a handler hustled him out of his hotel suite to videotape a quick endorsement for a clothing line. From there, he climbed into the SUV, which now crawls toward the Sirius Satellite Radio studios. T-Pain is slated to spend an hour there taping interviews. 

“Come on,” says Dave Abrams, his burly manager, from the seat next to him. “This is fun!”

T-Pain pulls out an iPhone ringed with crystals and starts playing with apps. His new album, Thr33 Ringz—full of space-age R&B heavy on the digitally processed Wall-E warble that has become his trademark—is circus-themed, and if part of the point is that the music industry is a Big Tent, today marks the start of the hoop-jumping routine every pop star must perform in the almighty name of album promotion. “This ain’t fun, man,” T-Pain says. “This is work.”

He doesn’t say the last word so much as gag on it. Weurghk. To T-Pain, 23, work means a job, and that’s what he got into music to avoid. “Out of 31 days in a month, I’m at the strip club 15,” he says. That’s the one part of work he loves: research. A multi-platinum R&B star who dabbles in rapping and producing, he’s proud to say that he’s been employed exactly once, when he was 18. “I used to cook seafood and sell it out of a truck with my dad,” he recalls. “That’s one of the worst jobs ever. I would stink for weeks! Can you imagine trying to talk to girls smelling like raw fish?”

He drags from a Black & Mild cigar—his favorite brand—rolls down the window and hocks a loogie. It almost connects with a delivery man pedaling alongside us. “Of course, when it came to girls,” T-Pain adds, “it didn’t hurt that I have a gigantic penis!” He erupts into a two-part laugh: an opening salvo, arcing and guttural, followed by three staccato cackles: Huuaaaagh! Hanh! Hanh! Hanh!

This is how T-Pain makes work tolerable: He goofs off, amusing himself with little off-color rebellions. At Sirius, while one DJ is interviewing him, T-Pain starts appending the word ho’s to every third sentence, Tourette-style. As in: “I just shot the video for my first single. Ho’s.” Or: “Yeah, I worked with Kanye, Luda and my man Weezy. Ho’s.” In hip-hop gossip circles, fans often speculate that he has lied about his age, that he must be older than 23. Right now, that number seems about 10 years too high. 

DJs shuffle out; other DJs shuffle in. After T-Pain finishes recording a dozen personalized station IDs (“It’s your boy T-Peezy, keepin’ it locked to Sirius Hot Jamz 50!”), he promises to send the station programmer a copy of his second single within a few days.

“Barry’s gonna be pissed,” says Abrams, leaning against the studio wall. Barry is Barry Weiss, T-Pain’s label boss, and he’s gonna be pissed, apparently, because that single is not supposed to hit radio for several weeks.